I’ve always needed a gimmick

April 25, 2013

I’ve always needed a gimmick to write non-fiction. So to write something vaguely autobiographical I created this idea of a calendar. A girlie calendar. Which you used to see hanging in almost every service station, most work places, etc. The calendar then became an ebook. It is called appropriately Calendar Girls. And you can download it for free. A bargain at twice the price. (old joke)

February

I can’t remember what she looked like. Her image has completely dissolved into the past. But not the strange irony of our meeting. I was hanging out in Yorkville during the early 1970s. Yorkville was a kind of Greenwich Village in Toronto. There were a lot of hippies, wannabees, and suburban longhairs. I was one of the latter. There were traffic jams every Saturday night from the people in cars who wanted to look at us. I was in a particularly depressed mood that Saturday. This pretty girl, a red head, sat down next to me and we talked. I was hoping to jump her bones so I told her that no one remembered anyone else. That we were all anonymous nobodies. (What a pick-up line.) I told her that she would forget me in a week. We went our separate ways. Several years later I was at a party in a town hundreds of miles from Toronto. Full of wine and myself. I started to put the moves on one particular young woman. She told me a story. She had just returned from Vancouver. While there she had been at a party when a young woman, a red head, had tried to pick her up. Her name was February. They went back to the woman’s hotel room and had sex. Afterwards February told her a story about a young man. A young man she had met in Yorkville years earlier. Who had told her that she would forget all about him within a week. It had been years and she hadn’t been able to get that young man out of her head. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was that young man. And now years later I can’t get that incident out of my memories. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it means anything. But the story has this sense of being… odd.